lagering in plastic

I personally would not recommend lagering in an HDPE bucket since it is oxygen permeable and over the lagering phase this could lead to beer oxidation.

You would be best served to lager in an oxygen impermeable vessel.

Cheers!

 

My first lagers went from primary fermentation to the bottle, where I primed them for a few weeks and then stored them cold, i.e., lagered, in the bottle 1-2 months before starting to drink them. The beers were good. The downsides are (1) as with all bottle conditioned beers, you need to pour carefully to avoid the yeast residues at the bottom, and (2) you spent time bottling. There is nothing magical about lagering the whole batch vs the bottled beers. Of course, once I got a keg set-up, I started lagering in corny kegs.

 

+1 @JackHorzempa

When I age stouts in the secondary for 2-6 weeks, I do it in glass, no O2.

 

I will set my timer for the inexorable response to your statement here.

Cheers!

 

Last sentence, first paragraph

 

I can't open your link. Something went wrong. I get a message "This site can't be reached."

 

Looks like I messed up the copy and paste somehow.

http://howtobrew.com/book/section-1/priming-and-bottling/priming-and-bottling-lager-beer

Anyhow, the point isn't simply that John Palmer said so. Just that I have done this technique and it worked, and I didn't just pull it out of my asshat.

 

I suppose an argument can be made (and Palmer sort of does) that if you are bottling and have no choice but to bottle prime, then it's better to lager in the bottle. But the fact is that if you keg, you don't have to compromise, and you don't have to be careful pouring (which can't keep all of the settled yeast and phenol/protein aggregates from getting back into suspension anyway). I think this is a big reason that the number of commercial breweries bottle conditioning their lagers is approximately zero.

Wouldn't want to disappoint.

 

I assumed the OP does not have a keg set up as he is asking about lagering in a bucket. I wouldn't suggest that anyone bottle their lagers if they had a kegging setup. But that is mostly because everyone thinks bottling is a pain, not because there are necessarily quality issues with bottle-primed lagers.

As for the inevitability of suspended sediments, I thought I got pretty good at bottle conditioning in the 8 years of brewing before I started kegging, and I learned to keep the yeast in the bottle. Or maybe I just learned to like the taste of suspended phenol and protein aggregates? I do feel like there is something missing in my brewing sometimes...

 

Before I kegged I lagered in my buckets. If there was oxygen I picked up I could not tell. Good luck!

 

Not sure if Brulosophy has done it but it would be a good experiment. I know in other countries plastic bottles are popular.